by Tim Storck – Web Developer at Fusion Design
When creating a shopping cart or ecommerce website, there are many platforms and tools to choose from. WooCommerce, a shopping cart solution for WordPress websites, is one of the leaders in ecommerce for small and medium-sized businesses. One of the great things about WooCommerce is the combination of it being both big and open source. This is a powerful combination when it comes to security.
WordPress, the website framework that WooCommerce is built on, is one of the most-used website frameworks on the internet for almost 2 decades. A large, open source project means that any vulnerability in the software is quickly discovered and patched.
It is recommended to use a widely-employed platform for ecommerce, and make sure it is regularly updated. Keeping software up to date is one of the primary practices for maintaining security, especially for sites handling sensitive data, such as ecommerce transactions.
A recent vulnerability discovered in WooCommerce serves as a good example of how WooCommerce is a secure choice for ecommerce. The vulnerability was discovered by a security researcher and responsibly disclosed. The WooCommerce team immediately released a patch, alerted the community, and worked with the WordPress team to make sure that as many sites were receiving the update as possible.
WordPress is an open source project, and it has been, since its beginning, in 2003. Open source projects with healthy developer communities produce secure software, for a couple of reasons. First, they have a large and independent set of developers who are continually looking at and improving the codebase. Second, open source means a kind of capitalism of solutions, in which the best solutions win out. History has shown that open source software is often the most secure. Much of the world’s most trusted software is open source. It is subjected to the most scrutiny.
WooCommerce, the ecommerce plugin for WordPress, is also open source. So what you have with a Woo site is an ecommerce platform that is maintained by a very extensive community of developers, which is very good for security. If a vulnerability is discovered, it is rapidly patched, making WooCommerce web stores very secure.
We at Fusion Design configure and manage WordPress updates, including plugins such as WooCommerce, so that versions are virtually always current. We also are connected to the WordPress and WooCommerce communities, so that we are notified if new issues come to light.
Contact us for more information on our managed ecommerce services.
